


The Burden of Reversing Fate's Course

by TurboGhast



Category: Touhou Project
Genre: Dream World, Gen, Nightmares, Power Incontinence, Self-Reflection, Two Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28952004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurboGhast/pseuds/TurboGhast
Summary: Sagume ponders the burden her ability to reverse the course of any event she speaks about places on her, among other things.





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this work on the r/touhou subreddit. Works I create in the future will be posted here and linked there, since this website is specifically designed to hold prose works and reddit isn't.

Alarms blared as a soldier relayed a message to Sagume.

“A force of invaders has begun attacking the Lunar Capital! Due to the ferocity of their attacks, other information is hard to confirm.”

“It can’t be Junko.”

The words had somehow managed to leave Sagume’s mouth before she scrutinized them. She tried to extend the sentence to rein in her powers, but couldn’t think of words sure to keep things from getting worse.

Across the city, explosions of purity rang out at every weapons cache they had. The one who destroyed them took to the skies to proclaim her success.

“While you were distracted with that conveniently timed incursion, I erased your ability to fight back or escape. Now surrender Chang’e to me!”

Sagume surveyed the damage as she considered whether to capitulate, but quickly concluded that the Lunarians were doomed either way. Fulfilling Junko’s every wish wouldn’t prevent the other group of attackers at their door, or anybody else nursing a grudge, from walking in unopposed and leaving the moon irreparably sullied with impurity.

While waiting for certain doom to befall her home, Sagume woke up.

The catastrophe she created was merely a nightmare, yet her heart still rang with alarm. Seeing the lunar capital up and running didn’t calm her nerves. Sagume couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth, yet she still hyperventilated.

After thinking about it for a moment, Sagume found the events of the dream absurd. Within them, her powers operated on other people’s misconceptions of how they worked. Her words only reverse the course of the situation they’re about, which wouldn’t necessarily make them false. The attack would have gone from success to failure or vice versa no matter what she said about it.

However, these thoughts didn’t dispel her nervousness. Unrealistic as it was, the dream still spoke to the reason she stopped to think before uttering even a single word. Because reversing a single event could irreversibly change the course of the world, she needed to be incredibly careful with her powers.

On top of this, the dream was really about a lie she told the world becoming the truth. When using her powers, she chose her words so that reversing the course of the event she spoke about made them false to hide their limits. If she really wanted to, she could correct the misconception, but she took advantage of it instead.

As Sagume got dressed, her thoughts wandered towards the dream world they recently left. Dream selves have no restraint, no matter how much restraint the person they were based on did. Her powers could affect the real world from the dream world. Thus, her dream self could reverse the course of real events she dreamt about. Yet when Sagume pored through her memories for evidence this had occurred before, she found none.

Since her introspection reached a dead end, she left the lunar capital to find out why her dream self appeared to not have the abilities she logically should. To start, she sought out the ruler of the dream world, who either knew the answer already, or needed to learn it for her domain’s sake. Seeking Doremy out was simpler than expected, as she was expecting her.

“Here for an explanation of your dream last night, are you?”, Doremy asked.

Sagume nodded her head affirmatively.

“You should already know enough to work it out yourself.”

Sagume nodded her head disapprovingly. She’d set out because that wasn’t true.

“Do you really think you can force an explanation out of me?”

Sagume nodded her head affirmatively, then took a deep breath while pointing to her mouth.

“Fine. I’ll just tell you, if you’re going to be that insistent.”

A smile formed on Sagume’s face as Doremy spent a moment wording the explanation.

“Your dream self, like any other, has an exaggerated version of your personality and the same body. If she was willing to use your power, it would work without a hitch. Yet she doesn’t use that ability, ever.

The insecurities of a dream dweller get magnified with every other emotion, and your greatest fear is that your powers will cause a disaster. As a result, your dream self is completely mute.

When you hear yourself speak in a dream, in truth you’re not saying a thing. Despite this, the dreamscape around you reacts as if you did. This effect is most pronounced during a nightmare where your fears come true, like the one you woke up from this morning.”

With a nod of her head, Sagume noted her thanks for, and satisfaction with, the explanation. She could feel her nerves loosen up as she thought about its ramifications. The resulting calm ran deeper not needing to take action. Knowing her subconscious acknowledged the world-shaking nature of her powers lightened their burden on her conscious mind.


	2. Part 2

On her way back to the lunar capital, Sagume flew into the Lunarian checkpoint between the moon and the dream world. The place had taken on a noisier demeanor since Junko’s latest attack on the moon, as the guard had been doubled to prevent her strategy from working again. Yet some Lunarian officials called this move an underreaction to their entire civilization being brought to the brink of irrevocable change.

At the moment, the checkpoint was quiet enough to resemble its past self. The nervous edge in the eyes and ears of the guards showed this was only a temporary resemblance, though. Sagume joined their eavesdropping, because something capable of causing this change was worth listening to.

She only realized they were eavesdropping when she heard the voices of the lead guard and their direct subordinate arguing about how exactly to interpret one of the most minor rules they were to abide by. Both were embroiled enough to completely miss the points the other made, or that their competing interpretations meant the same thing. Sagume worried that if it got more intense, words with long term consequences would come out of their mouths.

As their superior, albeit indirectly, it was her responsibility to prevent this from getting further out of hand. However, using her rank to make them stop wouldn’t ensure they’d remain cordial after she left. That would require getting both of them to realize the argument was a collective overreaction, a complete conversational u-turn.

Mentally phrasing her goal as “cause the conversation to reverse its course” made Sagume realize she could reach it by using her powers. Her gut reaction was that this event was too minor to be worth the inherent risk of doing so, but she gave the idea more consideration after failing to devise a more effective alternative. Her ability could douse a fire as easily as it could start one, and this was mere spark compared to the sort of chaos she’d reined in with it before. The stakes of the situation were minor enough that the worst case scenario was a fight she could break up, an outcome that might occur if she didn’t interfere.

Sagume stopped at the door of the room they were in and spent a minute thinking about what exactly she should say. Careful wording would ensure she changed exactly what she wanted to and nothing more. Finally, having devised a counterargument for every reason not to use her powers she could think of, she opened the door and spoke.

“You two seem to be having an intense argument.”

Her words were calm and decisive, even though what she said sounded like an offhand remark. Out of anybody else’s mouth, that’s all it would be. Out of hers, such a comment was a call for change.

Fortunately, the exact change she intended occurred. Their argument faded into apologies for acting foolish and overinterpreting the rules split evenly between her and eachother. Satisfied with the results, Sagume silently accepted the apologies and left.

As she did, a smile formed on her face. She had used her ability, and the world around her was the same except for one positive change. Over the next hour, her smile changed from one of perturbed relief to one of content satisfaction.

Despite the many ways using her power to reverse the course events she spoke about could go wrong, it was still her most powerful problem solving tool. The extreme drawbacks of the ability were outweighed by its more extreme benefits. Convincing herself to use her powers was a lengthy task for a reason, yet doing the nigh-impossible felt dangerous easy anyway.

But doing something with dangerous ease is still doing it with ease. A wide array of scenarios could be reduced to “Find an effective counterargument for the many reasons not to use her powers”, a difficult problem, but one she had practice at. Sagume couldn’t count the number of times her powers turned out to be the cleanest solution to a problem, yet her discipline ensured she could count the number of times they had made one worse, the fear of the mistake occurring again etching the event into her memory.

Out of simple curiosity, Sagume retraced her life in her head to see if she really didn’t know how many times she’d used her powers to her advantage. By the time she lost count, she had outlined an autobiography in her head. So much would have turned out differently if she didn’t have that ability that a version of herself without it would be completely unrecognizable. For all the tightropes it made her walk, the power was a part of her she neither could nor would deny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second part was written to fix a flaw I noticed in the first, so they're too linked to be separate works.
> 
> I preserved the chapter split when reposting the work here to learn how to use this website's multichapter feature.


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